CentOS 6.0 install on Dell E6410 laptop

First I would like to say, "Thank You!" to all of the hard working developers and other at CentOS. In spite of some VERY well published delays in getting CentOS 6.0 out the door, it's finally here! I hope to see 6.1 soon.

I am using a more recent Dell E6410 laptop with 4GB RAM, an Intel i7 M620 CPU and dedicated nVidia GT218 [NVS 3100M] video card. WIFI is handled by the Broadcom BCM4314 chipset. Pretty good by current standards. It's the same laptop I have used for my Fedora 13 review.

When I first went to burn the i386 .iso file, k3b greeted me with an interesting, "your image will not fit on your disk" kinda message. I was puzzled and then discovered the issue noted in the CentOS 6.0 release notes about the DVD+R media creation issue. Fair enough, I did not have at the time any other media, so I just overburned past the disk and tried to boot from the media anyway (which worked fine for *my* install). Just don't try to validate the disk ;)

Next, my default DVD install attempt was met with a very disappointing blank/black screen with the onboard Nvidia ??? video card. My good buddy google quickly lead me to some information that either "nomodeset" kernel option or install with the "basic video driver" would be needed. And either of those allowed me to move on through the install.

Reboot after install leads to a rather disappointing 800x600 resolution login screen. At least there is a login screen at all. First a quick <ctrl><alt><f2> key sequence to dump me to console in order to log in as root in order to do a full update and reboot just to see if that will help my screen resolution issue with the *default* install. Darn, still no better resolution! Need to jump to elrepo's kmod-nvidia fast.

Normally, the rpmfusion repository would be my way to get the included BCM4313 with a simple
yum -y install broadcom-wl kmod-wl-`uname -r`
After being told by yum that there was nothing to install, I scratched my head and google'd a bit and found that "Due to an excessively restrictive license accompanying this Broadcom driver, the ELRepo repository developers have refrained from supplying it via an rpm package" according to at least CentOS Broadcom page. Shame on you Broadcom... at least there is a way around the issue based on the instructions on the CentOS page noted! It would be so much easier if Broadcom's legal would just relax.

The bluetooth functions without issue. I could pair with my Droidx in seconds.

Sadly, I don't seem to be able to update the BIOS from the Dell OMSA repository. Initial indications are that they don't care.

Here's the lspci for the laptop:

00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor DRAM Controller (rev 02)
00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor PCI Express x16 Root Port (rev 02)
00:19.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation 82577LM Gigabit Network Connection (rev 05)
00:1a.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset USB2 Enhanced Host Controller (rev 05)
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset High Definition Audio (rev 05)
00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset PCI Express Root Port 1 (rev 05)
00:1c.1 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset PCI Express Root Port 2 (rev 05)
00:1c.2 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset PCI Express Root Port 3 (rev 05)
00:1c.3 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset PCI Express Root Port 4 (rev 05)
00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset USB2 Enhanced Host Controller (rev 05)
00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 Mobile PCI Bridge (rev a5)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation Mobile 5 Series Chipset LPC Interface Controller (rev 05)
00:1f.2 RAID bus controller: Intel Corporation Mobile 82801 SATA RAID Controller (rev 05)
00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset SMBus Controller (rev 05)
00:1f.6 Signal processing controller: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset Thermal Subsystem (rev 05)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation GT218 [NVS 3100M] (rev a2)
01:00.1 Audio device: nVidia Corporation High Definition Audio Controller (rev a1)
03:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4313 802.11b/g LP-PHY (rev 01)
04:00.0 SD Host controller: Ricoh Co Ltd Device e822 (rev 03)
04:00.4 FireWire (IEEE 1394): Ricoh Co Ltd Device e832 (rev 03)
3f:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor QuickPath Architecture Generic Non-core Registers (rev 02)
3f:00.1 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor QuickPath Architecture System Address Decoder (rev 02)
3f:02.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor QPI Link 0 (rev 02)
3f:02.1 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor QPI Physical 0 (rev 02)
3f:02.2 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor Reserved (rev 02)
3f:02.3 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor Reserved (rev 02)

Helpful links:
E-Family Reimage “How-To” Guide
E6410 Manuals

LibreOffice for CentOS 5 or CentOS 6 install howto

OpenOffice at this point seems to have stalled out with no recent bug fixes. The LibreOffice folks seem to to be be moving forward and fixing issues. This is just a simple install howto for getting LibreOffice onto your otherwise stock CentOS 5 or CentOS 6 desktop system. If you are doing these easy steps, you might as well take the steps to get Thunderbird 5 or FireFox 5 on your system. I have every reason to believe that all of these steps will work just fine for any Scientific Linux 5 or 6. Heck might as well just stall onto the otherwise identical RedHat Enterprise Linux RHEL 5 or RHEL 6.

First download a version of your choice.

UPDATE 05/02/2012: the following code has been updated for the 3.5.3 release of LibreOffice.

wget "http://download.documentfoundation.org/libreoffice/stable/3.5.3/rpm/x86/LibO_3.5.3_Linux_x86_install-rpm_en-US.tar.gz"
tar -xzvf LibO_3.5.3_Linux_x86_install-rpm_en-US.tar.gz
cd LibO_3.5.3rc2_Linux_x86_install-rpm_en-US/RPMS/
mv desktop-integration/libreoffice3.5-freedesktop-menus-3.5.3-2.noarch.rpm ./
yum remove openoffice\*
yum install --nogpgcheck lib*

You will likely want to install the helppack rpm

wget "http://download.documentfoundation.org/libreoffice/stable/3.5.3/rpm/x86/LibO_3.5.3_Linux_x86_helppack-rpm_en-US.tar.gz"
tar -xvf LibO_3.5.3_Linux_x86_helppack-rpm_en-US.tar.gz


yum install --nogpgcheck LibO_3.5.3rc2_Linux_x86_helppack-rpm_en-US/RPMS/libobasis3.5-en-US-help-3.5.3-2.i586.rpm

You can copy line for line or copy paste into a script, but the jist of what needs to be done is easy to figure out above.

Redhat menus install nicely

Startup loading bar is nice

LibreOffice starts fast and looks familiar to existing OpenOffice users, but with more bug fixes

One easy upgrade! Nice job LibreOffice peeps! Enjoy.

CentOS 6.0 install on Dell D630 laptop and short review

First I would like to say, "Thank You!" to all of the hard working developers and other at org.org. In spite of some VERY well published delays in getting CentOS 6.0 out the door, it's finally here! I hope to see 6.1 soon.

Once again, I am using my venerable Dell D630 laptop with 2GB RAM, a dual core Intel T7500 and dedicated nVidia G86M Quadro NVS 135M video card. WIFI is handled by the Broadcom BCM4312 802.11a/b/g chipset. Modest by today's standards. It's the same laptop I have used for my Fedora 15 beta review. I can say with certainty that both this laptop and I are very grateful to be running Gnome 2.x instead of 3.x!

When I first went to burn the i386 .iso file, k3b greeted me with an interesting, "your image will not fit on your disk" kinda message. I was puzzled and then discovered the issue noted in the CentOS 6.0 release notes about the DVD+R media creation issue. Fair enough, I did not have at the time any other media, so I just overburned past the disk and tried to boot from the media anyway (which worked fine for *my* install). Just don't try to validate the disk ;)

Next, my default DVD install attempt was met with a very disappointing blank/black screen with the onboard Nvidia NVS 135M quadro video card. My good buddy google quickly lead me to some information that either "nomodeset" kernel option or install with the "basic video driver" would be needed. And either of those allowed me to move on through the install.

The rest of the install proceeded without issues. After the reboot, I was glad to see the nouveau driver seems to work well enough after the initial install problem. I was even more happy to see my wifi (Broadcom Corporation BCM4312 802.11a/b/g) installed with *no* intervention. And by this time, I always expect the onboard ethernet of (Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme BCM5755M Gigabit Ethernet PCI Express) to work without issues or intervention. Thankfully, I was not disappointed with any networking issues. Sorry to say that this laptop does not have bluetooth onboard, so I can't test that.

I was greeted with good old Gnome 2 running after login. Everything looked fine at 1440x900 resolution without messing with any xorg.conf file! I do not yet see a reason to blacklist nouveau. I expect even less to use the a downloaded NVIDIA-Linux-*.run file as the elrepo binary kmod-nvidia* version will end up being no additional work after a kernel upgrade.

Laptop is running very stable, dynamic CPU fan control functions as expected. Suspend and resume has not had any issue at all with the nouveau driver. Nice to have it all just work (minus the install quirk).

More updated versions of most major apps would be better. OpenOffice 3.2 is included rather than 3.3 or even better now, the Libreoffice version that Fedora 15 has.

In the end, I would have to say that for a good solid Linux OS experience, I would suggest CentOS 6 as a good option to any current distribution. You will have a long support cycle and a very stable base.

I have a very minor annoyance that seems to be shared now with all the recent Fedora versions; resuming the laptop shows an initial screen that is your session even with the screen lock applied. This running session screen last only a second or two, but kinda odd that it shows at all.

As a note, I have added the "xdriver=vesa nomodeset" options to my PXE install for this class of device to get past the video driver issue on install.

For completeness, here is the lspci for this Dell D630:

00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Mobile PM965/GM965/GL960 Memory Controller Hub (rev 0c)
00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Mobile PM965/GM965/GL960 PCI Express Root Port (rev 0c)
00:1a.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB UHCI Controller #4 (rev 02)
00:1a.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB UHCI Controller #5 (rev 02)
00:1a.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller #2 (rev 02)
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) HD Audio Controller (rev 02)
00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) PCI Express Port 1 (rev 02)
00:1c.1 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) PCI Express Port 2 (rev 02)
00:1c.5 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) PCI Express Port 6 (rev 02)
00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB UHCI Controller #1 (rev 02)
00:1d.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB UHCI Controller #2 (rev 02)
00:1d.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB UHCI Controller #3 (rev 02)
00:1d.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller #1 (rev 02)
00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 Mobile PCI Bridge (rev f2)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 82801HEM (ICH8M) LPC Interface Controller (rev 02)
00:1f.1 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801HBM/HEM (ICH8M/ICH8M-E) IDE Controller (rev 02)
00:1f.2 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801HBM/HEM (ICH8M/ICH8M-E) SATA IDE Controller (rev 02)
00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) SMBus Controller (rev 02)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation G86M [Quadro NVS 135M] (rev a1)
03:01.0 CardBus bridge: O2 Micro, Inc. Cardbus bridge (rev 21)
03:01.4 FireWire (IEEE 1394): O2 Micro, Inc. Firewire (IEEE 1394) (rev 02)
09:00.0 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme BCM5755M Gigabit Ethernet PCI Express (rev 02)
0c:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4312 802.11a/b/g (rev 01)

My intent is to soon publish a server based CentOS 5.6 -vs- CentOS 6.0 competition review using the same hardware. Stay tuned.

CentOS 5.6 Thunderbird 5 working setup and install howto

UPDATE: Thunderbird 6.0 does not require the hack below!

If you are getting the error

thunderbird-bin: /usr/lib/libstdc++.so.6: version `GLIBCXX_3.4.9' not found (required by libxul.so)

You have come to one of the correct places. This is a continuation of the FIreFox 4 install. Again, I did not come up with this on my own! I just want to spread the word as much as possible that one very enlightened fellow referenced as "rkl" at forums.mozillazine.org has made it possible for the rest of us to hit the "easy button" and got FireFox 4.0 working on CentOS 5.x (CentOS 5.6 at this time). HERE is the original link that I lucked upon while trying to google it on my own.

This is my mostly plagiarized summary based on the original FF4 information for the link above. My testing was specifically done on CentOS 5.6 32bit desktop install:

1. Unpack the Thunderbird thunderbird-5.0.tar.bz2 somewhere (e.g. /opt/thunderbird5). A quick way to get the tar file is from the mozilla Thunderbird EN download link.

2. Download this 32-bit Fedora 9 libstdc++ RPM and unpack it with this command:

rpm2cpio libstdc++-4.3.0-8.i386.rpm | cpio -i --make-directories

3. Move the unpacked shared library into /opt/thunderbird5:

mv usr/lib/libstdc* /opt/thunderbird5/

Note: It's "usr/lib/libstdc*" above (i.e. the unpacked tree from the RPM, not the system /usr/lib tree) - do NOT put a leading slash there!

4. Run Thunderbird 5 with:

/opt/thunderbird5/thunderbird

I will say that TB5 is an *major* improvement from Thunderbird 3.x. So far there are less mailbox issues than with previous versions.